85 comments:

The tree houses are interesting, but the models of making latices from extremely fast growing and thus soft tropical tree-like things isn't going to make a house in a temperate climate any time soon. It's also an unfortunate fact that trees don't live forever, even the ones that grow very slowly. Nothing is particularly gained over building a house from harvested trees and growing vines on it.

In a whole lot of ways it's a neat idea. It's just not a practical idea. It's not going to solve any problems in the world but a tree-house might make a nice vacation bungalow. A boutique house.

There are serious problems using a tree itself as the structure. A fast growing tree is a weak tree. Strong trees grow slowly. Some other thing has to serve as the load bearing structure. And there are more problems. Trees flex. If there are branches and leaves up in the wind the house is going to have some serious problems with movement and stress. So it's going to have to be made on purpose to be flexible.

If the idea is to build a frame, including walls, out of a material that ivy or several wisteria won't destroy, then cool.

The only remotely interesting thing I've seen in regards to "green" house-building materials came back a couple of years ago. 2x4's were made out of bamboo by taking many (I think around 30 or so) layers of bamboo and laminating them together horizontally in a heat press. The look is definitely not the same, but the structural integrity is actually supposed to be better. And who cares what they look like when they're being used for rough framing?

That solves the use of forests, but the biggest environmental problem was the adhesive.

I don't understand how a tree lattice house keeps out the rain. You can take shelter under a tree during a thunderstorm but sooner or later (usually sooner) the water drips through on you anyway. And what do you do when the leaves fall off each October? Or doesn't a tree house depend on its leaves for water proofing--only its trunk?

This presenter raised more questions than he answered. As for the meathouse, who wants to live in what looks like a kidney? And what do you do for a view?

I don't understand how a tree lattice house keeps out the rain. You can take shelter under a tree during a thunderstorm but sooner or later (usually sooner) the water drips through on you anyway. And what do you do when the leaves fall off each October? Or doesn't a tree house depend on its leaves for water proofing--only its trunk?

This presenter raised more questions than he answered. As for the meathouse, who wants to live in what looks like a kidney? And what do you do for a view?

Another observation. I've seen this style of speaker/huckster a few times.

Speaking in a mildly outraged tone at some injustice (uusually a straw man) and coming back with their "innovative" solution. The interested people are often the (similarly?) misguided or those with no desire to consider the impracticable side of the solution. The only one with a chance to gain is the huckster. Often from some government subsidized "incentive". See solar panels, windmills, ethanol, etc etc.. What a crock.

Just think where we'd all be if it weren't for people like this willing to order our lives for us. If I recall, there are people in jungles and savannas everywhere who live in huts made from branches, leaves and grass. How come we don't get demonstrations from them? They just aren't good promoters.

I have a recurring nightmare, that apparently takes place long after a nuclear attack (or something) but the grid has been down, like forever, and everyone's living in housing overgrown by nature. Many people are living in the trees so they can look out for the roving gangs as they approach. People are trying to go on as before, though everyone's extremely skeletal with really patchy hair; they're wearing rags, the smell of death is everywhere, and there's that damned tribal drumming that never stops.

Here's the thing: the hippie, dreadlocked types are really pleased with themselves. They did it: they've "saved the planet" and finally got the upper hand on the rest of society. It's their world now. Everything is done according to astrology, etc., and there's no reason to how anything goes down. Rapes, killings - you name it - it all goes down with no interruption from anyone. Women gravitate towards whoever's strongest. There's no such thing as love. Showing intelligence, beyond knowing how to tie a knot or efficiently killing someone, is worthy of death sentence.

Living trees attract insects, birds which feed on those insects and the tree's sap, fungi, mold, bacteria and other things I would not want to have living in the structure of my house.

And it doesn't sound very friendly to allergy sufferers, either. I'm allergic to three things: Trees, weeds and grasses. A Casa de Kev made out of a tree would produce a sneezefest like no other.

(BTW, when I got tested for allergies in college, I was most amused by the two things I'm not allergic to: Cockroach venom--I've never had one live long enough to try and bite me--and cow dander. That's right--if the cows are shedding, I'm good!)

The phrase which got to me was (something like) "pregrown village." That implies a level of centralized "planning"/control which utterly appalls me. Very consistent with the lefty point of view, though.

wv: diesopi. Don't know what sopi did to deserve this, but it may have had something to do with meat houses.

Pogo, Thanks. Looks like an interesting book, based on reading the Amazon preview. The notion of narrowing vision to focus on measurable aspects of a complex whole may also provide a theoretical underpinning for the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The author seems to be a left-leaning academic, but cannot avoid the conclusion that statism leads to failure. It's interesting to read his concepts as they evolve. A libertarian or conservative would have made no bones about making direct comparisons to other statist endeavors. He does not do this at all.

So it's useful, in that it might be read by statists, and confuse the hell outta them.

It's so he can call together the online meetings of The John Birch Society that he presides over here.

How's your little quorum of two holding up this morning, Pogo?

Since your comments are like a broken record, I suppose you only really need one half-awake interlocutor and a post so marginally related to the drivel in your comments that it was actually, unbeknownst to you, a ripsnorting satire of them.

Pogo will now commence tying the conspiratorial ties that bind John Swift to Joseph Stalin in 3... 2... 1...

Mitchell's a creative visionary architect - a profession that features and thrives on something called creativity, which, to Pogo, must be a quality that borders on communism. That said, living vegetation as a structural component is more realistic than meat - (which is what got all your conserva-panties in a bunch anyway), and the first slide and the intentionally trumped up jargon while flashing pictures of petri dishes were clues as to where he was taking liberties with your gullible self.

That said, I trust a glutton with power less than a non-glutton. It's the conservative gluttons who would either turn your government statist, or better yet, create the conditions for it.

Not that I expect an obsessive hole-dwelling hobbit like you to realize it.

And you really find this creative? I doubt if he's less than the 1 millionth person to think of it.

When Bag o' Water, C.E.O., comes up with something as revolutionary as the incandescent light bulb, then I'll value his judgment on creativity and the thousands of creative attempts delivered by Edison and others before anyone could manufacture a functional product of that sort.

Bag' O' is a spokesperson for the lazy C.E.O. And he wonders why the country is the way it is.

Wow. A reference to the character and tactics of the fictional sociopath Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood.

Bag O' proceeds with his usual line-blurring between serious and ridiculous.

I daresay the idea of a durable component for delivering light will long outlive the strategy of finding new ways of raping the landscape to drain it of a limited resource with which to feed an unlimited need.

The guy is no more creative and visionary than the average run-of-the-mill golden age science fiction hack.

Granted, that's pretty creative, just 50 or more years ago.

And it's sort of neat if someone is trying to figure out how to do this stuff and how to make a tree grow into a house. But it's neat for the curiosity factor rather than an imaginary environmental benefit, because there isn't one.

Making meat actually grow into a structure that will put different sorts of cells where you want them to be is a medical miracle, and it's not going to be done with human meat while we're learning to do it. So fine. Grow curiosities first. Growing meat into a house is outright moronic, no matter that I've got at least one story with a "meat" spaceship.

Ok. But what have you added to human existence, Bag O., O Lazy C.E.O.? I mean, other than the creative (if retarded) idea that the quality of your own health care reflects the quality of every American's health care?

Actually that's quite a contribution. In so few words you showed the world just how out of touch you are with everything in this country. America thanks you and salutes you.

See that's a big difference between us Ritmo. I'm impressed and thankful for modern medicine lead by American innovation and the power of a free market and you are impressed by the innovation of the tree house.

It doesn't have anything to do with America or The Market TM. I don't need to make a religion or ideology out of things I already (and anyone can already) understand.

It has to do with your inability to get to the root of any problem, and, instead, make a religion out of over-complicating it. Once you've succeeded, you then devise treatments for your over-complications and call them miracles of ideology.

These are not new innovations by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is the behavior motivating it.

And a pretty ridiculous approach for a man who has contempt for too many words.

I guess complicating everyone's life in non-linguistic ways is more your cup of tea.

The difference between Edison and Bag O' is like the difference between Fleming and an industry that over-utilized the redundant antibiotics they "invented" to the point where most infections are resistant to them.

"Sorry. Maybe you're not the one best equipped to handle these problems, then.

It wouldn't make sense to accept that attitude by a partisan of the faction that can only believe in "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps" now, would it?"

Try this next time: "NO."

See how easy that is? I guess I'll just have to survive without a large piece of the the collective wisdom of mankind. Some of us are just not worthy and so I must resort back to my bootstraps again. Damn, life is hard.

And you really find this creative? I doubt if he's less than the 1 millionth person to think of it.

When Bag o' Water, C.E.O., comes up with something as revolutionary as the incandescent light bulb, then I'll value his judgment on creativity and the thousands of creative attempts delivered by Edison and others before anyone could manufacture a functional product of that sort.

Bag' O' is a spokesperson for the lazy C.E.O. And he wonders why the country is the way it is.

I say it starts with him.

Schtikmo, do you honestly believe that this is a product of innovation, much less an endeavor of satire? Do you work in the innovation market? Have you ever designed a product from concept to production? Do you even know what that takes? There are very few real architects in the world, but morons who fantasize about meat and tree houses deserve as much derision for wasting the time of real innovators instead of being promoted as real thinkers. They are not and you are certainly not.

BTW, speaking of lazy CEO's, how much golfing does it take before a President is considered an absentee executive? I don't play the game myself, but I got to guess Obama has got some kind of record going.

I don't want to imply that I want him in the office working any more than he is, but damn. Do you think maybe even he thinks the country is better off with him on the links (or is it lynx)?

Did you ever wonder, what if the crew of the Titanic just got drunk and passed out soon after leaving England? Maybe they would have missed that iceberg.

It takes more politics and bullshit to design something from concept to production than is worth discussing with anyone as negative and impossible to deal with as Meth-Head-Rest, so I see no need to answer to him on that. And as far as Mitchell Joachim's value to the market, I think it's safe to comfortably contrast the former's compensation and renown with Meth-Head-Rest's.

In the meantime, Google pays its employees to devote 20% of their time to non-project oriented ideas. But apparently an asshole like Meth-Head-Rest knows better than them when it comes to creativity, how to cultivate it, how wide a latitude to give it and how it is best made profitable, so why bother responding? Did you hear what that little shit knows that you don't, Larry and Sergey and Eric?!?!?

There are very few real architects in the world, but morons who fantasize about meat and tree houses deserve as much derision for wasting the time of real innovators instead of being promoted as real thinkers.

"When Thomas Edison became successful with a light bulb filament he invited members of the scientific community to observe his demonstration. Although many from the general public went to witness the lamp, the noted scientists refused to attend. Sir William Siemens, England's most distinguished engineer said "Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress." Professor Du Moncel said "The Sorcerer of Menlo Park appears not to be acquainted with the subtleties of the electrical sciences. Mr. Edison takes us backwards."

Hey, don't forget that guy with the sweat lodge in Sedona, AZ. He made a lot money too, and ManBearPig and Bernie Madoff.

"Republicans think the job of the presidency is to make everything all about politics."

I wondered who started all that. Those fuckers!

BTW, I've taken hundreds of products from concept to market including all the production in-house. It's not all that hard and only political if you let it be. For example: my line of 275 styles of paper clips. Every one a miracle of innovation.

Human history is riddled with examples of innovations and research that had been suppressed and derogated by the leading science community and the accepted scientific conventions of the time. Throughout human history, many innovators became the victims of the insults of the skeptical scientific, governmental and corporate power elites.

Many innovators, scientists, and scholars know that disagreeing with the dominant view is risky, especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. When someone introduces a new innovation, presents an unconventional scientific view, or comes out with a new way of doing things that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body, representatives of that group attack the innovator's ideas and the innovator personally. Such attacks are carried out by censoring writing, blocking publications, withdrawing or denying grants, taking legal actions, and spreading false information or rumors.

What are the effects of suppression of new ideas, intellectual dissent, unconventional, or unpopular scientific views? Suppression is not only a denial of the open debate that is the foundation of a free society, it also creates artificial barriers and in effect retard innovation and creativity. Moreover, it has a chilling effect that breeds external censorship as well as self-censorship. If we can learn anything from the history of science, it is the dissidents and the unconventional thinkers who have spurred science on.

The following quotes and facts illustrate the initial hostile and trivializing attitude towards new ideas, scientific inquiries, and revolutionary innovations.

“I watched his countenance closely, to see if he was not deranged... and I was assured by other Senators after we left the room that they had no confidence in it." --Reaction of Senator Smith of Indiana after Samuel Mores demonstrated his telegraph before member of Congress in 1842.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." --Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs’ discovery of the metabolic cycle that would eventually bear his name was rejected from the journal Nature.

When Nobel Laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar presented his ideas at the Royal Astronomical Society in January 1935, most famous astronomer at that time, Arthur Eddington, ridiculed his ideas. It took decades before the Chandrasekhar Limit was accepted by all astrophysicists and eventually his idea became the foundation for the theory of black holes. Forty years later, Chandrasekhar was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics.

Galileo’s ideas about the universe were first dismissed as being impossible. The priests and aristocrats feared the worldview that his ideas were beginning to force upon people. Galileo was placed under house arrest.

Nobel prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi never got funded for his work on the relevance of quantum physics to living organisms.

As documented by Dr. Brian Martin of University of Wollongong, in his books and articles, many scientists pursuing research critical of pesticides or proposing alternatives to pesticides have come under attack and have been threatened with dismissal and in some cases had been dismissed. Government scientists critical of nuclear power have lost their staff and have been transferred as a form of harassment.

When Nobel laureate Hans Alfven came up with the idea of parallel electric fields he was ridiculed for his work.

When Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius proposed his idea that electrolytes are full of charged atoms, it was considered a crazy notion.

“Mr. Bell, after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities." -- J. P. Morgan's comments on behalf of the officials and engineers of Western Union after a demonstration of the telephone.

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." --Western Union internal memo, 1876.

Luigi Galvani's experiments were ridiculed because they countered established views. He was called the "frogs' dance instructor." His innovative experiments eventually became the basis for the biological study of neurophysiology.

When Scanning-tunneling microscope was invented in 1982, it was met by hostility and ridicule from the specialists in the microscopy field. In 1986, the inventors won the Nobel prize.

George Ohm's initial publication was met with ridicule and dismissal and it was called "a tissue of naked fantasy." Ten years later, scientists recognized its great importance.

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" --David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." --Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

When Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen first warned that chemicals called cholorofluorocarbons or CFCs, were destroying the ozone layer they were ridiculed for their work. In 1995, Rowland, Molina and Crutzen, won a Nobel Prize.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man." --G. B. Shaw.

In 1908 Billy Durant, in trying to raise money to create an automobile trust, boasted to J.P. Morgan & Co. "that the time would come when half a million automobiles a year will be running on the roads of this country." This annoyed Morgan partner George W. Perkins who said "If that fellow has any sense, he'll keep those observations to himself." Unable to raise capital in Wall Street, Durant went home and put together something called General Motors.

When Warren and his team introduced a new facet to MRI theory, his colleagues at Princeton told him that his insane ideas were endangering his career. They held a mean-spirited bogus presentation mocking his work. After seven years, Warren was vindicated. His discoveries are leading to the development of new MRI techniques.

During 1903 to 1908, Wrights' claims about their airplane invention were not believed. Most American scientists discredited the Wrights and proclaimed that their mechanism was a hoax.

The inventors of the turbine ship engine, the electric ships telegraph, and the steel ship hull were initially met with disbelief and derision for their work.

"If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it." -- Albert Einstein.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."--Arthur Schopenhauer.

“At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.” -- Aldous Huxley.

"Every great advance in science has been issued from a new audacity of the imagination" --John Dewey.

"That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next" --John Stuart Mill.

"Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created" --Albert Einstein.

"No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess"--Isaac Newton.

"That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time" --John Stuart Mill.

"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false."--Paul Johnson

"Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as "conceptual necessities", etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors." --Albert Einstein

Or explain to us why you think this is a good idea that would work even at the end point of technological development.

We *already* make houses out of trees.

And (all of us old enough) fantasized about the tree house in Swiss Family Robinson or the elves making the trees grow into houses because they refuse to *cut* into wood or a lawn inside of our house, but we also, all of us, come from cultures that lived in or on or below growing things and we tended to stop doing that because it's not efficient.

What it is, is that same elf fantasy applied to the environmental movement. Bravo to the guy if he can get funding, but I wonder when his target greenies are going to sus to the fact that he's talking about *gasp* genetic engineering? Or that the most important part of the house is the non-growing engineered parts of it that make the green facade possible?

Heck, I've got files that are 10 years old describing how my terraformers on Indi 4 are using ceramic lattice to support Kudzu because trees are too slow growing and the vertical space and need to create an understory too important.

If some of us are unimpressed with the "innovation" involved here, it's because there is nothing innovative about it.

It takes more politics and bullshit to design something from concept to production than is worth discussing with anyone as negative and impossible to deal with as Meth-Head-Rest, so I see no need to answer to him on that.

Of course you don't see a need to answer me, it's because your really don't know. I'm a mechanical engineer. I design and develop product from concept to manufacture. I'm a product design and developer. It's been my career and love for the last 25 years. It's what I am and it's what I do. I've been to 3 TED conferences, 2005, 2006, and 2008. I know what they are and there have been more ideas and concepts that hold real practical value then the retarded, semi-laughable bullshit like tree & meat houses. I understand the process of iteration and of seeing moronic ideas that can spur other more valuable ideas, but it takes real brains instead of flailing for conference material to develop good if not great ideas that may or may not be seen as having value or of ever being adopted. Usually because technology isn't quite there or costs would make them prohibitive.

Your cut n' paste of Edison and Graham are an insult to these people and what they endured. Not because you are completely clueless as to the thinking and methodology of the time that allowed others to spur their ideas as nonsense, but because the one thing that these important men possessed beyond the irrational silliness of proposing a tree and meat house was perseverance. They are and were actually producers, Mitchel Joachim, the last time I've looked hasn't produced anything outside of theory or real substantive value. There is a place for people like that, but not in the real world. If something comes out of their fantastical thoughts, then great. Otherwise, these people and specifically people like you need to just get out of the fucking way and let real producers make the things you take for granted.

Your life is in essence sound and fury and all that comes with it. What have you produced besides volumes of meaningless drivel passed off as actual thought?